A wonderful collection of short stories written between 1977 and 2010. Pearlman creates perfectly realized micro-worlds in just a page or two with perfectly believable characters who make you laugh, cry, or groan with frustration but who are never boring or able to be ignored. She writes convincingly of children, adolescents and adults, both the very old and the newly parented, about Americans and immigrants, about the rich and the poor. Most live in Godolphin, mildly camoflouged Brookline, Massachusetts. Wonderful phrases fill each story in this National Book Critics Circle Award winner.

“Minnows traveled together, the whole congregation turning this way and then that, an underwater flap-flapping in an underwater wind.”

“… in the middle of nowhere…past the glinting stones of the house, its whitewashed interior summer’s greenness and winter’s pale blueness seen through its deep windows, the mysterious endless brown of the peaked space above her bed…and pond and trees and loons and chipmunks…not nowhere. Somewhere. Herewhere.

Pearlman demonstrates the most basic ability to create deep emotional feeling, loss in the story; acceptance in Elder Junks, both in How to Fall and Grauski.